by Glen Frost
"Is the wrong answer."
She transferred the assault rifle to his left knee and fired again. This time, Vlad's scream was so shrill and high-pitched that it would have made dogs wince. More ice-cold water poured through the torn pool cover. Vlad's butchered legs were soon immersed and he slowly began to sink as the cover took on more water.
"That looks like it hurts too."
"Please...pleeeease..."
"You are singing a very different tune now. Look at me Vlad. I said LOOK. AT. ME."
Sobbing, Guskov's enforcer stared up at her with pleading, desperate eyes that were filling with tears.
Anya let her mask drop.
Vlad couldn't believe what his eyes were telling him. The sight of a leering death's head stared down at him, its chest and belly a mass of ugly black gunk. His eyes widened, releasing the pent-up tears to stream down his cheeks. Anya wanted him to see this, wanted him to see what men like him had done to her at Guskov's behest.
She jammed the AK's muzzle between his legs, brushing aside his groping fingers, and pulled the trigger a third time. Vlad screeched like a forlorn soul, anticipating the loss of his manhood in the most excruciating way possible.
Click.
The assault rifle's magazine was empty, and so was its chamber.
"It seems to be your lucky day after all." Anya shrugged, tossing the useless weapon on top of the wounded man's chest. Her native accent was thickening, as it sometimes did when death was in the air and her dander was up. "I wonder which will kill you first? Bleed or drown. Either way, result the same. Pig."
She spat in Vlad's face, then walked nonchalantly away in the direction of the stairs.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters were painted black from nose to tail. Neither of them bore a single marking that would identify their unit. There was a very good reason for this: they weren't military helicopters at all.
They belonged to The Agency.
In better weather, the pilots would have flown nap of the earth, skimming ridgelines and the contours of hills in order to minimize their visibility to the general population; in weather this shitty, however, such a tactic stood a high chance of getting everybody on board killed. The pilots kept their birds at an altitude of three hundred feet, plus or minus ten, which kept them from crashing into power lines and other remote structures, yet also gave them enough reaction time to pull up when a particular piece of elevated terrain cropped up in their flight path.
"Target's dead ahead," the lead pilot announced over the radio. He was broadcasting both to the second ship, which was flying directly behind him, and to all the personnel in the passenger compartment. "Two minutes."
The Black Hawks dropped down into a valley. The target's house should be somewhere ahead and to the left.
"There," the co-pilot pointed, "eleven o'clock."
"I see it."
The house stuck out of the hillside like a sore thumb. The pilot counted two, no, three floors and a garage. He began to dump altitude fast, dropping the UH-60 down to a hundred feet, then fifty. When he bottomed out at thirty feet, the rotor blades began kicking up a backwash of snow, swirling it up all around the helicopter's airframe.
"Thirty seconds."
Little flashes of light suddenly appeared on the uppermost story, tiny pinpricks that grew larger as the two birds closed in on the house. The pilot was a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan. Recognizing them for what they were, he jinked slightly to the right in an effort to avoid the incoming small-arms fire.
"We got incoming from the third. I'm gonna circle around and put you on the roof from the back side."
"Rog," said a voice from inside the passenger compartment.
The Black Hawks banked left, arcing around to the rear of the house. Both pilots pulled up and flared their aircraft into a hover some twenty feet above the roof. The side doors of each helicopter slid open, and coiled ropes were thrown out. Clad entirely in black, assaulters slid down the ropes, going hand over hand until their boots thudded onto the roof. The split second that they landed, each assaulter darted away to make room for the next man on the rope.
When all sixteen men were down and clear, the two pilots applied power and pitched the Black Hawks' noses forward, gaining altitude and airspeed in order to clear the area. They would orbit at a safe distance until the target was declared safe by the assault team commander and a landing zone had been set up.
The ground force split into two teams. Team One made for the balcony from which the pilots had seen flashes of gunfire during their approach. This information had been communicated over the headsets to the team leader, who duly noted it as a high-priority threat that needed to be neutralized as soon as possible. This they did by tossing flash-bang grenades over the lip of the roof. The grenades landed with breathtaking precision on the balcony floor, where they duly detonated; each one exploded to the accompaniment of a deafening 180 decibels and threw out six million candles' worth of light, rendering the three guards that Vlad had posted up there blind, deaf, and borderline dumb for the next few seconds.
All three of the guards dropped their weapons, while trying to reach simultaneously for their eyes and ears in order to protect them from the brutal onslaught of light and sound. This would have been an ideal opportunity for the assaulters to knock them down and take them prisoner, but despite their somewhat misleading title, Agency capture teams rarely chose a solution that was anything other than lethal.
Silenced submachine guns engaged their targets decisively, firing multiple three-round bursts into the heads and chests of Guskov's men. Not a round went astray. All three of them went down hard, spurting blood from multiple wounds. The assaulters dropped down onto the balcony and just for safety put two in the head and one in the chest of each fallen man.
The rearmost man on the assault team pulled a lapel mic to his mouth and said, "Balcony clear. Making entry into the third floor now and beginning clearance sweep."
"Rog," said the leader of Team Two. Her men had found four skylights spread across the roof. Breaking out the glass, the assaulters lobbed flash bangs down into the bedroom and library below.
Obeying his orders to the letter, Dmitri had ushered Padilla and Guskov upstairs and into the master bedroom, then closed and locked the door the three of them inside. He found it immensely comforting to know that a team of three men held the balcony, and three more were prowling the library and staircase on this floor. The rest of Guskov's guards were one floor below them on the second floor, spread between the kitchen and the living room.
Vasily sat down on the bed and studiously avoided making eye contact with the Supervisory Agent, choosing instead to focus on the sounds of automatic gunfire and shotgun blasts that could be heard coming up from the basement.
When the men on the balcony raised their assault rifles and started firing them off into thin air, Guskov began clutching at the bedsheets with an air of distinct nervousness.
"What the hell are they shooting at? There's no way this revenant of yours can fly!"
Padilla kept his mouth shut. He knew full well what was flying toward the house: a pair of Agency choppers carrying a fully kitted-out capture team. Thanks to years of training and real world operations, he knew the assault drill back to front. It was practically ingrained in his DNA at this point. The moment those first flashbangs went off on the balcony outside, he threw himself down between the bed and the wall, then settled in to wait for the fun to start. With his service pistol and backup laying somewhere out there in the snow, there wasn't much else he could contribute to the inevitable gunfight.
Dmitri began pacing back and forth, the sweat gleaming on his bald scalp. He fingered the trigger of his AK nervously. He was one of the rare few of Guskov's hires to have come from a gangland rather than a military background, which was reflected in the fact that his assault rifle selector was set to full auto rather than triple or single-shot.
; Seconds stretched away into something that felt like infinity. The gunmen on the balcony outside quit firing. Dmitri and Vasily watched as they ejected their magazines, rammed fresh replacements home, and reloaded their weapons. When they didn't resume firing, both Russians felt a surge of hope and relief. Perhaps they had neutralized the threat after all...
...except that gunfire was still coming from two floors down, the harsh staccato drumbeat shaking the floorboards beneath their feet.
Suddenly the entire world was nothing but blinding light. The balcony windows erupted, showering the bedroom with shards of glass. Dmitri's eardrums threatened to rupture when the flashbangs went off outside. Panicked, his finger curled around the trigger and pulled. The Kalashnikov obeyed, spraying the room with thirty rounds of 7.62mm ammunition. Although Dmitri never saw it, one of those thirty rounds actually found a human target, punching out the back of one of his colleagues on the balcony in a fist-sized mass of blood, rib, and tissue. The remaining twenty-nine wreaked carnage on the bedroom, several passing through the wall into the library next door, where a very expensive first edition copy of The Lord of the Rings was shredded.
Equally panicked, Vasily clapped his hands over his ears, screwed his eyes tight shut, and staggered toward the bedroom door. He fumbled the lock open by touch alone, pulled the door inward towards him.
The skylight above his head shattered, covering his head, neck, and shoulders in broken glass. Two heavy thuds signaled the arrival of a second pair of flashbangs, which exploded in a blizzard of sound and fury at a much closer range than those outside. Vasily screamed, falling rather than walking out onto the landing. His foot found thin air and suddenly he was tumbling head over heels down the stairs to the second floor.
Ironically, that added minutes to his life. The assaulters that dropped in through the library and master bedroom skylights came down with guns blazing. Dmitri was not so much shot dead as shredded, taking over thirty rounds to his head and torso. His corpse would be completely unrecognizable once the dust settled, unable to be identified even by dental records.
The guards in the library fared no better. One got off a return burst, a single round of which took one of the assaulters squarely in the chest. The assaulter's body armor stopped it cold, leaving him with nothing more than a deep purple bruise to be iced at a later time.
Teams One and Two linked up in the ruins of the master bedroom, where they quickly found Padilla and identified him as a friendly.
"Third floor clear," the assault commander said into his radio mic. "Heading to the second."
CHAPTER TWENTY
Two of Guskov's goons were positioned at the top of the stairs, shooting sporadic bursts of fire down into the hallway below. They were firing blindly, Anya knew, but if she rushed the stairs in a full-on frontal assault then she would take a lot of bullets before she was able to close on them both. A lot.
Would her revenant body survive that many hits? She had no idea. Come to think of it, she had no idea whether it could even be killed, or destroyed, or whatever else you wanted to call it.
Rushing the stairs was beginning to look like her only option, but when the sounds of breaking glass, explosions, and sustained gunfire from somewhere up above began to reach her ears, she started to think that the situation might be changing.
Sure enough, the fire coming from the top of the stairs began to slacken, and then stop. Anya glanced quickly at the pool, where the blue cover was sagging badly at the closest end to her. Vlad's body was underwater and no longer moving.
Good riddance, you fucking pig.
Steeling herself for what was to come next, she dashed out into the hallway and bolted upstairs, taking them three at a time. Anya expected to find herself looking down the barrels of a pair of assault rifles, but was surprised to find the top of the staircase clear. It didn't take long for her to find out why. She had walked into the middle of a firefight between what could only be two opposing forces: Guskov's men, and who the hell knew who else?
The roar of gunfire was almost deafening up here. Figures in black jumpsuits and wearing body armor were storming down the master staircase, trading bursts of fire with casually-dressed men in the living room and kitchen. Those were Guskov's, she knew without a doubt, and it looked very much as though they were on the losing side. Four of them were down, three of them missing portions of their heads, while a fourth was clutching his blood-soaked thigh and throwing out curse words in Russian through gritted teeth.
To her left, one of Guskov's men had taken cover behind a kitchen counter. He was taking potshots at the men in black on the staircase. When Anna emerged into the kitchen, he was startled, swinging the barrel of the gun around to face her. A knife rack sat on the countertop to her right. Without conscious thought, she whipped out the knife with the thickest plastic handle, reversed it, and hurled it underhand with all of her strength.
She had chosen a butcher knife with a fourteen inch blade. The tip entered the gunman's throat just below his chin, angled upward toward the roof of his mouth. With a strangled cry, the man went down hard on his ass. Blood gushed out of his mouth and down his throat. Had he still been breathing, the man would have drowned in his own blood; yet the knife's blade had penetrated his brain, killing him instantly.
In his final action on this Earth, the gunman's finger involuntarily tightened on the trigger. The rifle spat five rounds, blowing off the toes in his left foot and shattering a pair of floor tiles.
Anya took a second blade from the rack, this one thinner and better suited to filleting. The glass window of a kitchen cabinet cracked open to her left, broken by a stray bullet. She fell into a crouch, taking cover behind the counter and trying to get a better handle on the situation.
The assaulters were stalled on the staircase. Guskov's men were stuck behind whatever makeshift cover they could find. In the middle of it all, she saw an old man on his hands and knees crawling toward a doorway.
Guskov. It HAS to be.
Miraculously, he reached the door without getting hit and managed to open it up, then disappeared inside it. The cowardly old fuck was escaping, she realized, her jaw clenching. He was the only reason she'd come here. No way in hell was she going to let him flee now.
Counting to three in her head, Anya sprinted across the kitchen floor. A bullet took her in the upper right arm, then a second in the shoulder on the same side. She brushed them off as little more than the inconvenience that they truly were. Two hits, and she was through the door. It led to another staircase, this one leading downward. It had rock walls on either side. Guskov was disappearing around the corner at the bottom.
She could hear the sounds of women screaming down there, even above the gunfire. Anya took the stairs fast, her stilettos thump-thumping on each one.
What she found at the bottom shook her to her core.
Women. Seven of them, by her count. All were naked, chained up to the wall, and all carried multiple bruises and welts. One had an obviously broken nose; another's buttocks looked more like hamburger meat than human flesh. Somebody had tortured and abused these girls. Although it didn't flow in her veins any more, Anya could feel her blood begin to boil. No wonder the poor creatures were crying out for help.
She turned to face the old man that was cowering against a table filled with sex toys and torture implements.
"Guskov. I knew you were filth, but this is...beyond words."
He started to deny it. "It wasn't me, I swear," the Russian trafficker pleaded, recognizing her for the revenant that she was. "It was Vlad. These girls are his playthings. I had nothing to do with—"
"LIAR!" It was the girl with the broken nose. "He paid to have us all brought here under false pretenses. Promised us a new life in America. Then when we got here, he took our false passports away. Beat us! Drugged us! Locked us up down here and raped us. Vlad had his fun too, but this one is responsible for all of this."
Anya's expression turned thunderous. She beg
an to take slow, measured steps toward Vasily. "You. This...this...obscenity is all down to you!"
Vasily shook his head desperately, but could tell from the murderous look in Anya's eyes that she didn't believe him. That only left Plan B. Reaching into his pocket, the trafficker brought out a chrome-plated snub-nosed .38 revolver and pointed it at Anya with a trembling hand.
"If you hurt me, you will never get your daughter back," he sneered, thumbing back the hammer.
Anya did not respond for a second, gathering her thoughts. Darya was the one thing that mattered most to her in all the world, and yet if she had learned one thing in the days since her murder and resurrection then it was this: anything was possible. She would find her beloved Darya if she had to travel back home to Khabarovsk and fetch her in person.
Some forms of evil were too vicious to be tolerated. As she looked around his dungeon at the pleading faces of his naked slaves, she knew with absolute certainty that Vasily Guskov was just such an evil.
The .38 slug hit Anya in the neck. It was a straight through-and-through, leaving a neat black entry hole and a slightly bigger exit wound. She didn't break stride for an instant. Terrified beyond all reasoning now, Guskov stepped back as far as he possibly could until he was hemmed in by the table and one of the rock walls. In desperation, he raised the barrel of the .38 to his temple.
"One more step and I will kill myself. Who will bring you your precious Darya th—"
Anya moved with the speed of a striking cobra, swatting the revolver out of Guskov's hand. It clattered to the floor. The old man made to go after it, but Anya backhanded him, slamming him backward on top of the table; it collapsed, dumping him onto the floor in a shower of plastic sex toys. Vasily lay in a heap, groaning.
"Wait here," she told him in thickly-accented English, "and have no fear. I will be right back."
Anya went to each girl in turn. Taking their chains in her hands, she gripped them tightly and began to pull them apart. The iron links groaned in protest, but her supernaturally-enhanced strength always won out. In less than five minutes, all seven women had been released from both the chains and the manacles. They stood in a circle, staring at one another and Anya in disbelief. When the last one had been freed, she addressed them all.